In the course of the debate on the Alternative Vote, Churchill has been occasionally quoted, usually from the following section of his relevant 1931 speech: The plan that they have adopted is the worst of all possible plans. It is the stupidest, the least scientific and the most unreal that the Government have embodied in their Bill. The decision of 100 or more constituencies, perhaps 200, is to be determined by the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates. […]

I attended much of the second reading debate on the Protection of Freedoms Bill today, conscious that liberty is still the subject about which I have written most, judging by the tag cloud, bottom right. There’s much in the Bill to be glad about and I shall certainly support it but of course I would have liked it to do more. I discover that many of my colleagues are less concerned about these issues than I might have liked: we […]

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Via Atlas Shrugged: Is Hollywood about to destroy a classic? » The Cobden Centre, a brilliant quote from Atlas Shrugged: Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of […]

Truly, in political economy we do not ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ like Newton claimed to do in the hard sciences, but rather we allow each new generation of intellectual pygmies to perpetrate the same old errors over and over again. via Sampson – The Currency under the Act of 1844 » The Cobden Centre.

I found myself reflecting on my last EU-related rebellion and some words spoken privately to me by a senior Conservative MP at the time. It put me in mind of Henry V, for better or for worse. In Act 4, Scene 3, once Gloucester, Bedford, Westmoreland, Exeter and Salisbury have agreed upon the fearful odds against them, the King enters and Westmoreland wishes that one ten thousandth of England’s idle were with them for the battle. The King responds: What’s […]

Via Wikiquote, Churchill, November 17, 1906, Institute of Journalists Dinner, London: For my own part I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities which he excites among his opponents. I have always set myself not merely to relish but to deserve thoroughly their censure. Arrogant, yes, but perhaps an appropriate response to some of the venom poured out on Twitter.

Conserving only the underlying stable rules, while letting individual decision making drive change, is a concept that a century of technocracy has made foreign to most people. It does not fit neatly into the comfortable old left-right dichotomy and does not line up with technocratic assumptions about the powers and uses of government. It has a hard time making its case, because it promises only general patterns of improvement — spontaneous order and discovery — not specific results. — Postrel, […]